Graphics processing units (GPUs) have been standard offerings on most PCs for several years. The graphics processing units are usually specialized circuits designed to rapidly process information to accelerate the building of images in a frame buffer for display. GPUs are also becoming increasingly common in mobile phones and game systems. They are generally adapted to process computer graphics more effectively than general purpose central processing units (CPUs).
Data centers tend to have highly specialized hardware. Highly specialized hardware can be valuable for various reasons. First, the processing in data centers is historically centered on server workloads, such as filing and saving data. Thus, designers and manufacturers of data center servers focused hardware on those specific workloads. As hardware was focused on workloads, components that were unnecessary for those workloads were not included in the servers. It is also known that, if you have a rack of servers, it may be useful for physical space, heating, and power requirements to have specific type of hardware on a specific rack. If every component on a rack is a general CPU with basic supporting components, the power requirements, dimensions of the components and the like will all be simple and standard. As such, current data centers have been designed such that GPUs cannot be on the same rack as the servers.
Remote desktop applications such as Remote FX have a virtualized graphic device that lives in a child virtual machine that communicates with a host partition. The host partition has the physical GPU, and all of this is contained in one box. As such, although it is possible to provide a remote desktop with offerings like remote FX, data centers, server racks and current server design are not suited for GPU applications and/or remote desktop applications.